In the moment

Focus is such a powerful tool and so often overlooked.  Focus helps a person ignore what doesn't matter and spend time and energy on the things that do matter. 

I was thinking about this (and about 100 other things) a few days ago while my wife was asking me to do some things for her.  At the time I had in my (very limited) short term RAM:

- Coaching basketball for my daughters
- Identifying a financial planner and meeting with her
- Calls I needed to make for a charitable organization meeting
- Tasks around the house that need doing
- Summer vacation plans
- And, of course, stuff from work

So, needless to say, the stuff my wife asked me to do bounced off the overloaded psychic RAM and it did not get done.  I've always believed that the "Getting Things Done" concept to get things out of your mind is correct, but I can really see the problem of overloaded mental RAM.  Doing something well in the moment requires having some free space in the brain, and some free cycles, to do it well.

I always thought that actors seem to do this well.  They talk frequently about being "in the moment" and blocking everything else out.  I guess most of them don't have kids.  But from a productivity point of view, being able to clear your RAM and spend your mental cycles on one issue at a time makes a significant difference in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and quality.  I think the thing that suffers most when I am overly taxed is attention to detail.

When your brain shifts from task to task repeatedly, it tends to lose some of the details and issues that surround the problems or tasks you are working on.  I think in computer memory terms this is called "leakage".  So, no matter how good you may be at multi-tasking, you'll be doing work that is not as high quality as you'd hoped, and find yourself reworking tasks you thought were complete or finding errors in documents or work that was "finished".

I think methodologies like Getting Things Done make a big difference in getting a lot of the day to day stuff out of your mind, but the way we work creates so many distractions that even a great methodology like GTD will still require that you close your door, turn off your cell phone and have time to think without interruption.  I was listening last night to NPR and a commentator was talking about BADD - Business Attention Deficit Disorder - primarily caused by the BlackBerry.

The more I thought about it, the more I think that many of us do suffer from BADD, and we need to learn to spend more time "in the moment" without the distractions.

Comments

[Random Name]

So true. One day, I said to my wife, "I think I suffer from "Attention Deficit Disorder." "You mean you can't concentrate?" she said sarcastically. "Yeah, that, too," I said.

[John Maher]

There is a real importance here to have a the good old-fashioned To Do list. This is your hard-drive that allows you to dump things out of RAM that you can return to later when the RAM becomes available again. I think the key is to make sure you only have one To Do list or possibly two if you want to divide up personal and professional tasks.

In addition, I believe management has a responsibility to avoid forcing employees to have no focus / BADD. I come from a manufacturing background and many years back a company I worked for had production meetings where a Pareto diagram was reviewed based on items that disrupted flow through the manufacturing process. Even though there were 3 items or so causing 80% of the disruptions, rather than circling the wagons to knock these three items off - my then manager always wanted to go through the entire list of 30+ items to check the status of getting them corrected. Since nobody wanted to come to the meeting and state they had not looked into an item, all 30 items were probably < 10% complete and 0 items ever became fully completed.

Currently, I am consulting with a manufacturing company that was is difficult shape. We had around 4 open items that I believed and they agreed would get them 90% of the way to where they wanted to be. One of my primary rolls since the 4 items were agreed to has been cutting off any activity or discussion beyond these 4 items until the 4 items are completed. These additional items are placed on the To Do list until the top 4 are completed.

A good manager may have a long To Do list for their employees, but they need to make sure they re-inforce focus by only asking (which is an informal measurement that re-enforces a behavior) about the top items on the list until they are gone, then moving on to the next.